


Eigengrau

by jaspell



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and pining, Gen, Queerplatonic Relationships, Widobrave Week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:39:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28008582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaspell/pseuds/jaspell
Summary: Eiselcross brings it to the fore. All wrapped furs and layers that trap the heat in, keep it bound to their skin.She wants to hold his hand, and it doesn’t make sense.
Relationships: Nott | Veth Brenatto & Caleb Widogast, Nott | Veth Brenatto/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	Eigengrau

Veth stands by Caleb’s leg when she’s exhausted, leans into him. Wants to put an arm around it, wants him to reach down and squeeze her shoulder, but that’s juvenile.

She makes a crude joke about keeping warm. I have rosewater, Caleb, if you need it. The rest of them scoff or roll their eyes and somebody changes the subject, but he looks at her quickly and then away, his lips twitch as he scratches his neck with a gloved hand.

They hover in their shared study for too long even though they’re both desperate for sleep. Neither wants to say the words. It’s not _goodnight_. It’s a sigh:

Well, in the morning.

A sigh: Yeah.

When the wind gusts the right way she’ll catch a hint of his comforting smell, different but the same under the bite of snow that comes up to her knees.

She wants to hold his hand, and she does for a minute, and then too quickly she has to scout ahead and she and Beau get into an argument. When they rest, she frets over the blackened dagger in her belt, polishes its surface and tries to forget all about it.

She’s a fool to think - to think of her and Caleb at all. I need you, he’d said, but that’s…..that was different. It’s different for him. The truth is nothing to be scared of and she’d be a fool to deny it: his heart is somewhere else, somewhere in a faraway city, or worse.

But then, Veth thinks, then why is he _looking_ at her like that?

She wonders what the others notice. They orbit each other, trudging close side by side. Caleb manoeuvres a cat’s claw down the side of a mountain, holding her fast against him as she shrieks and ducks at the speed. At the bottom, she laughs at the spray of ice on both their faces and beckons him down to wipe it off. The pinkness of his cheeks is from windburn, it must be.

He only has to smile and she’s overcome with love. She aches to put small kisses on his mouth and his cold pink nose. When they get somewhere warm, his stomach, the hollow of his clavicle.

-

His room is full of eigengrau and there’s a ringing in his ears, and his body knows Veth’s better than anybody else’s: knows the sound of her murmuring sleepily and just how her weight would indent the mattress- the gravity of her curled into the crook of his knee.

The animal urge to feel the softness of her plaits as he gently undoes them, to breathe into her hair, to pull her into his lap.

Yes, Eiselcross makes it all far worse.


End file.
